Mobutu Sese Seko: Corruption and Murder in the Heart of Africa

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Now, onto today’s video. It was an era of hope that soon descended into agony. In 1960, the Belgian Congo was at the forefront of a wave of decolonization sweeping Africa. After generations of exploitation, this gigantic nation, larger than Alaska and California combined, was free from European rule and determined to forge its own destiny. For a handful of months, that shining future looked to be within reach, but then it slipped through everyone’s fingers. Instead, the Congo found itself under the brutal dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, a leader more corrupt than nearly any other in his era.

Mobutu, a former journalist and army officer, had started out as one of the good guys, friends with Patrice Lumumba, an advocate for independence and a firm believer in helping the people. How he got from there to the depths of kleptocracy is a tale of hubris and tragedy that Biographics is exploring today.

On the depressing top 10 list of nations you definitely don’t want to get colonized by, the number one spot surely goes to Belgium. In 1876, King Leopold II took a gigantic swath of Africa as his own personal property, turning its lush forests into the heart of darkness. Decades of enslavement, murder, and mutilation followed as the Belgian king pillaged the land. Although his own government eventually stripped him of his possessions in 1908, the damage had already been done. It was into this wounded, brutalized place that Mobutu would be born.

Coming into the world on October 14, 1930, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu started his life weighed down by disadvantages. For one thing, he was born out of wedlock, an unexpected son barely acknowledged by his father. For another, he grew up in a village so remote that it didn’t even appear on maps. Yet his greatest disadvantage was something far more intrinsic: Mobutu was born Black in a place still under Europe’s thumb. The Belgian Congo, which had replaced Leopold’s regime, may have been a step up, but it was still rife with racism. All the good jobs and important postings were held by whites, leaving locals to dream of shattering that bulletproof glass ceiling.

While this shameful setup ignited a fire in people like Patrice Lumumba, Mobutu’s way of dealing with it was more nuanced. For the first 30 years of his life, Mobutu was very much in the “if you can’t beat them, join them” camp. Thanks to a French education at the hands of Belgian missionaries, he was eventually able to leave his remote village and travel to the capital, Leopoldville. There, he began a career in colonial service, joining the Force Publique and rising to the rank of sergeant, one of the highest ranks available to Black people.

However, it would be his parallel career as a journalist that made him interesting to the Belgians. While working as a reporter in Leopoldville, Mobutu made contact with the pro-independence movement. By the mid-1950s, no one could ignore the wave of decolonization sweeping the world. In the Belgian Congo, riding the crest of this wave was Patrice Lumumba, a left-wing nationalist who believed the Congolese could rule themselves more effectively than those who thought mayonnaise with fries was a legitimate snack food. As he reported on Lumumba, Mobutu got to know him better than almost anyone and even joined the Congolese National Movement, a pretty radical step at the time.

Yet there’s some suspicion today that Mobutu was not quite as radical as he seemed. In 1959, he traveled to Belgium to study journalism in Brussels at roughly the same time that negotiations were taking place on decolonization. Standing in for Lumumba when the activist was briefly jailed, it’s thought Mobutu may have been passing information behind the scenes to Belgian intelligence, acting as an asset for the colonials even as he was publicly pushing for independence.

If that was the case, it didn’t do authorities in Brussels much good. That same year, pro-independence riots paralyzed Leopoldville. Suddenly faced with the prospect of a colony 77 times their size becoming ungovernable, the Belgians decided to run for the exit. On June 30, 1960, the Belgian Congo ceased to exist, becoming the independent nation of the Republic of the Congo, a name which quickly had the word “democratic” attached to avoid confusion with its identically named northern neighbor.

With the transfer of power, Patrice Lumumba was elevated to premier, with his political rival Joseph Kasavubu serving as president. More importantly for today’s story, Mobutu entered government, taking the post of Secretary of State for National Defense, effectively giving him command of the army. Little could Lumumba or Kasavubu have known it, but this well-spoken journalist would soon turn out to be the worst person for the job imaginable.

Although it might have been independent, the word “stable” would not have been anyone’s choice to describe the Congo in 1960. Just days after colonial rule ended, a mutiny broke out in the army against the white officers, which Mobutu only managed to put down through the hasty distribution of bribes. Around the same time, a civil war erupted as the wealthy province of Katanga tried to split off under leader Moïse Tshombe and form an independent state. On top of that, Lumumba and Kasavubu began fighting for control of the government, a power struggle that threatened to destabilize the entire region.

Into this rapidly developing crisis came the geopolitical gas canister known as the CIA. 1960 was the height of the Cold War, with the Cuban Missile Crisis just two years away. Shady government types were super jumpy about the idea of the Soviet Union picking up allies anywhere in the world. So when the leftist Lumumba asked Moscow for help putting down a rebellion in Katanga, it was tantamount to signing his own death warrant. To this day, many suspect the CIA’s weapon of choice was Mobutu.

By September 1960, the former journalist held perhaps one of the only solid power bases in the country: an army paid with donated American money. On the 14th, Mobutu used that armed power base to launch a coup, removing both Lumumba and Kasavubu from their posts. But only one of them would feel the full force of Mobutu’s wrath. After a long standoff at a U.N. compound, Lumumba was captured trying to escape on November 27th. Beaten and tortured, the independence leader was flown to Katanga and given as a gift to Moïse Tshombe, the rebel commander, who made sure he was never seen again.

While this was the end of Lumumba, it wasn’t quite the end of a semi-democratic Congo. With Lumumba dead and the Soviet threat neutralized, Mobutu stepped back from his coup, Kasavubu returned as civilian leader, and the army man slunk back to his base. Apparently, one of the reasons was the CIA’s unwillingness to back a strong man they regarded as weak. With his refined tastes, bookish air, and habit of indecision, Mobutu just wasn’t a guy anyone could see dictating anything. One American diplomat derided him as a “black Hamlet,” after the Shakespearean character who famously spends five acts doing nothing.

But that’s the thing about dictators: they come in all sorts of flavors. While some, like Adolf Hitler, are clearly megalomaniacs, others only show their true colors when it’s too late to stop them. The next couple of years passed in a series of rolling crises. With Western backing, the government was able to reintegrate Katanga with Moïse Tshombe, even going on to make him the Congo’s prime minister. But this just caused more problems, as Kasavubu started clashing with the new guy, just as he had with Lumumba. By 1965, their feud had become so bitter that the government was effectively paralyzed.

It was at this point that Mobutu pulled off his real coup. On November 24, 1965, the army announced that democracy had been suspended and all power temporarily vested in Mobutu’s hands. Thanks to the coup’s echoes of 1960, everyone was like, “Okay, I guess we don’t really need to worry. He gave us power back last time, right?” But Mobutu’s 1965 takeover would be nothing like the last time. In the aftermath of his seizure of power, Mobutu had Kasavubu placed under house arrest and Tshombe sent into exile. They both died in mysterious circumstances not long after.

By then, it was clear what was happening. Blaming partisanship for Congo’s crisis, Mobutu banned rival political factions, replacing the various parties with just one: the Popular Movement of the Revolution. Membership became mandatory, as did voting for it. So when Mobutu called a democratic election to decide his next move, the results were inevitable. Of all 20 million citizens, only 157 cast ballots against the party itself—a surprisingly large number, given there was literally no one else to vote for. Just like that, the era of democracy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was over.

With executive functions still suspended in the nation, now a one-party state, the ex-journalist at the head of it was suddenly free to do whatever he wanted. And what Mobutu wanted was to build one of the nastiest, most flagrantly corrupt dictatorships in all of history.

Sometimes, when we do these dictator videos, it can be hard to ascertain the exact moment they went from being in it for the people to being in it for themselves. However, there exists no such gray area where Mobutu Sese Seko is concerned. As far as we can tell, he stepped onto the leadership stage determined to act like a megalomaniac or tyrant. The tyrant part became incredibly obvious, incredibly quickly. Mere months after taking power, Mobutu had four government ministers hanged in a sports stadium in front of 50,000 people. While it’s not so shocking for the guy who willingly handed his old friend Lumumba over for a torture and murder session, it did mark a brutal new step in Congolese governance—one that would get more brutal as time went on, with torture and sexual violence becoming tools of oppression.

Nor was the oppression merely physical. Like most dictators, Mobutu was super keen for all his subjects to think and act as he wanted them to. In his case, that meant forcing everyone to accept his ideology of authenticity. When you just skim the basics, authenticity sounds kind of interesting, arguing against simply recreating European systems in the postcolonial era and instead looking to a political heritage that was truly African. But then you read what Mobutu defined as European, and you realize it was mostly just another excuse for keeping himself in power.

According to authenticity, democracy was inherently European, and an African society should revolve around a powerful chief, with the chief’s own ostentatious wealth and power being the sole way of measuring the nation’s health. So while for common folk, authenticity meant being banned from listening to foreign music, straightening their hair, or using Christian names, for Mobutu it meant a literal blank check. In his decades of rule, the Congolese dictator signed over so much of his nation’s wealth to his own pocket that by some counts, he was the most corrupt kleptocrat in history.

Now, such rankings are always a little dubious, and there are other contenders like Suharto or Ferdinand Marcos. But to give you an idea of the eye-watering embezzlement that Mobutu was up to, here are just a few of the things he blew ungodly sums on. Always a man of refined taste, even in his journalist days, Mobutu dedicated himself to collecting expensive trophies, which meant a string of mansions around the world and Concorde jets at his beck and call to take him on shopping trips at the drop of a leopard-skin hat.

Nor did he just use chartered planes to transport people. In one particularly memorable episode, the dictator decided he wanted to start keeping sheep on his ranch. Uninterested in European breeds, he ordered one of his jets to make 32 round trips to Caracas until as many as 5,000 Venezuelan sheep had been brought across the Atlantic. Ostentatious as all this was, it paled beside Gbadolite, Mobutu’s ancestral home.

Gbadolite had been an invisible village when he was born, a place colonial authorities didn’t even bother including on maps. But that wasn’t auspicious enough for Mobutu’s tastes, so he had the whole town torn down and rebuilt. Now, the mud huts became marble villas, the local mission a luxury five-star hotel, and a vast dam and hydroelectric power plant were constructed just to ensure the lights were always on when the leader visited. An airport was built with a runway big enough for Concordes to take off from. To top it all off, on the edges of the expanding settlement, Mobutu built himself a palace, one nicknamed the “Versailles of the Jungle,” a place stuffed with old master paintings and vintage French furniture where he could escape the capital and sip pink champagne while listening to classical music—all the while, his already ravaged nation sank deeper and deeper into poverty.

In this era, many referred to that nation as a “rich country of poor people,” alluding to its vast mineral wealth, wealth Mobutu personally siphoned off. By some estimates, he stole five billion dollars from the country. Such thievery was only made possible by having friends in some very high places. Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about Mobutu was how open he was about his sins. In 1977, for example, he gave a speech nominally warning of the evils of corruption, but which effectively doubled as a kind of advertisement: “Everything is for sale,” he declared. “Anything can be bought in our country.”

Again, this was dressed up as an anti-corruption speech, but those listening caught the high-pitched tones of the kleptocratic dog whistle. With Zaire rich in diamonds, copper, and cobalt, dozens of Western firms were more than happy to close their eyes to his abuses in return for buying up those resources. Who cared if their dollars flowed straight into the tyrant’s pockets? After all, it’s not like vastly more powerful actors weren’t interested in backing Mobutu—actors with the wealth and technology of entire states at their disposal.

By now, the 1960s had given way to the 1970s. What had once been the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been renamed Zaire by Mobutu, who’d likewise renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Bendu Wazabanga, or to give him the English version of his title, “The All-Powerful Warrior Who, Because of His Endurance and Inflexible Will to Win, Will Go from Conquest to Conquest, Leaving Fire in His Wake.” But while times may have changed, the Cold War was eternal. With communist influence always threatening to expand, Western powers were permanently on the lookout for bulwarks against Marxism. Who cared if those bulwarks were preposterous dictators who ate the finest foods while their countrymen starved?

So it was that Mobutu was able to stay in everyone’s good books, courted by Washington, Paris, and Brussels in return for stamping out the Soviet flame in Africa. Remarkably, this went well for the dictator even when it went badly. In 1975, Zaire sent troops across the border into Angola to stop a left-wing militia from taking the capital. Only it turned out that the left-wing militia had serious Cuban training and was able to wipe the floor with Mobutu’s troops and then seize power. Yet even this debacle didn’t dent his foreign support. When Katanga erupted in rebellion a couple of years later, French, Belgian, and Moroccan troops all came to his aid, backed up by American logistics. So long as he was anti-communist, Mobutu couldn’t be allowed to fall.

This is remarkable when you consider just how uncapitalist many of his policies were. In 1973, for example, saw the advent of “Zairianization,” a fancy word for the expropriation and nationalization of foreign-owned businesses. Unfortunately, it turned out that those foreigners—mostly Pakistani and Belgian, but Greek and Jewish too—were pretty good at business, while the cronies Mobutu handed their property over to weren’t. The result was a general collapse of productivity, which in turn fed into the general economic malaise and sense of decline—a decline that couldn’t be halted even with absurd stunts like paying Muhammad Ali and George Foreman five million dollars each to take part in “Rumble in the Jungle” in the renamed capital, Kinshasa.

Come the 1980s, the one thing keeping the nation economically afloat was high copper prices—prices high enough that Mobutu could pay off strong rivals and keep his cronies in relative luxury. Not that being a Mobutu crony was much fun. A man who liked to dominate people, Mobutu was fond of sleeping with his underlings’ wives, both to humiliate them and to show how powerful he was—how he could do anything, and you just had to smile and take it.

But no matter how powerful he felt, no matter how many broadcasts from TV stations began with an image of him descending from the heavens, Mobutu was far from the strongest force in his nation. As the 1980s progressed, the twin impersonal forces of economics and history were going to bend his regime to